


Fever Dreaming

by hiddenheadspace



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Season/Series 09, Coughing, Fallen Lucifer, Fevers, Gen, Human Lucifer, M/M, Sickfic, i really don't know when this is supposed to be taking place, implications of sam dealing with hallucifer trauma, kind of???
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-14
Updated: 2013-11-14
Packaged: 2018-01-01 10:54:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1043983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hiddenheadspace/pseuds/hiddenheadspace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Newly human Lucifer shows up at the bunker. Sam has no idea what to do with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fever Dreaming

When Lucifer had first shown up, he’d spent the first day mostly silent and glaring at Dean.

Sam avoided him until on the second night as he was trying to fall asleep Dean burst in without knocking looking irritated out of his head.

“He won’t go to sleep and I’m sick of it,” Dean snapped at him. “ _You_ deal with it.”

Dean stared at him meaningfully until he got back out of bed and stumbled down the hall to talk Lucifer into sleeping without making anything too awful for anyone.

“Look,” he said flatly, hovering in the doorway. “If you don’t sleep, you’ll die in a week or two. Your organs will shut down.” It took him a second too long to realize he was unconsciously quoting Marin from his stay in the psychiatric hospital.

Lucifer stared at him in stunned silence for a second that quickly grew into a very awkward minute.

“You look different,” he said at last, still staring. Sam shifted uncomfortably.

“Yeah, well, that’s humanity for you,” he said, and gaze up. He moved closer. “Why don’t you want to sleep?”

Lucifer’s expression grew abruptly more distant. “I don’t like it,” he said cryptically.

Sam nodded and turned the tables on him by waiting pointedly while the silence spiraled.

“I have nightmares,” Lucifer admitted.

Sam let out a short breath. “Oh.”

Lucifer frowned at his hands, looking irritated with his moment of weakness.

“Well,” Sam said slowly. “That can happen, especially if you’ve been, uh, afraid recently. If you do, you just have to…well, turn on the lights if you want, read a book, do something to take your mind off of it until you can fall back asleep.”

Lucifer was looking at him with a frightening amount of trust, so Sam started backing out of the room awkwardly. “If you don’t need anything else, then, I’ll…” He fled.

He hoped that would be the end of his duties of instruction on how to be human, but was proven very wrong.

He woke up disoriented and confused for half a second before his brain registered Lucifer leaning over him.

“Jesus!” he yelped, knife instinctively in his hand. Lucifer stepped back hastily.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. “Sam, I feel strange.”

Sam squinted at him in the dark, heart still thundering. He dropped the knife and flicked on the lights with a sigh.

Lucifer was as pale as a sheet and had a glazed look to his eyes that Sam recognized. He groaned before leaning across the bed to press a hand to Lucifer’s forehead.

Lucifer made a startled gasp and grabbed his arm reflexively. Sam pulled away and he let go after a second.

“You’ve got a fever,” he said. “Does anything hurt?”

“My head aches,” Lucifer said. “And my throat…” His voice was rougher than normal, Sam registered.

“This is the part about being human that sucks the most,” he informed Lucifer. “Come on.”

Sam got him some water from the kitchen and made him drink it. Lucifer had started coughing, too, looking pitifully miserable.

“We’ve got some cough syrup somewhere,” Sam said. “Go back to bed, I’ll bring it to you.”

Lucifer left, silently, and Sam dug through the mess in one of the cabinets until he found the nearly expired medicine.

“It’s going to taste like shit, fair warning.” Lucifer made a face as he swallowed.

“I said I’d never hurt you. You could at least do me the same favor,” he grumbled. Sam, caught off-guard, laughed.

“Sure,” he said. “That should help, anyway. If you still can’t sleep in an hour, come wake me up.”

“Thank you,” Lucifer said. He looked, in fact, genuinely grateful, and Sam didn’t think he’d _ever_ heard Lucifer thank anyone.

“Yeah, no problem,” he said, awkward again, and withdrew to his room to doze again. He was woken almost exactly an hour later. Lucifer was coughing on every awful, wracking exhale.

Sam stared up at him for a moment. “Alright,” he said, and grabbed a towel before they went back to the kitchen.

He heated a pot of water, overly aware of Lucifer’s eyes on him. It was almost two in the morning.

When the water was hot enough, he found a pair of oven mitts and lifted it off the stove and, after a rapid-fire deliberation, set it down on the ground. “Sit with the towel draped over your head—not like—no—” He adjusted it so that it hung like a ghost costume over Lucifer’s face. “Don’t touch the pan, it’s really hot.” He removed the lid and took off the oven mitts before moving the towel into place over the pot. Lucifer coughed in surprise at the rush of steam. “Hold that there.” Dean had done this for him once, boiled water and sat with him until the coughing that shook his whole body had settled down. He moved to draw back, but Lucifer reached for his hand.

Sam’s voice cracked as he tried to keep talking. “This should, uh, help, at least enough so you can sleep—” Their fingers entwined. He shut up.

He sat mutely with Lucifer for fifteen minutes until the coughing had started to relax. Sam cleaned up and helped him back to his room. Lucifer caught his hand again. His eyes were frighteningly hopeful in the dark.

“Will you stay until I fall asleep?” he asked.

Sam bit back an exhausted sigh. Fuck it. What harm could it really do?

He grabbed the chair that had previously sat unused in the corner and dragged it closer to the bed. Lucifer watched him from behind nearly shut eyelids.

“I’ll be here,” Sam promised. His own eyes grew heavy as he watched Lucifer’s breathing slowly even out. He spared a brief thought to the morning’s undoubtable awkwardness before he slumped forward to rest his head and arms on the edge of the bed and fell asleep, fingers still caught in Lucifer’s fever-hot grip.

In the morning, the return of Lucifer’s cough awoke him. He blinked enough awake to rub his back until he stopped shaking so badly. Lucifer looked at him sideways, startled to see him. Sam flushed, still half-asleep and discombobulated, and to his surprise, for the first time since his appearance at the bunker, Lucifer smiled. 

**Author's Note:**

> I've been really, really sick recently and I ended up ditching my nano fic to write this in protest of sleeplessness. This probably has mistakes I didn't catch; I barely even bothered to check, so sorry about that.


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